The Sociological Eye

Writings by the sociologist Randall Collins

Viewpoint

The sociological eye means looking at things for what they are, as best we can given the blinders of interest and ideology, of cliché and ritualized belief. It is not an individual enterprise. Chaining our efforts together as a long-term network of theorists and researchers improves one’s own sociological vision, provided we make the effort. The sociological eye holds up a periscope above the tides of political and intellectual partisanship, spying out the patterns of social life in every direction.

Thursday, December 1, 2016

The
Trump saga bears an uncanny resemblance to the TV show, The Sopranos, that ran from 1999 to 2007. Both are essentially soap
operas, serial melodrama of domestic life, set on the edge of criminality, and
beyond. This is a big part of their popular appeal.

A family in every sense of the
term

Tony
Soprano is the head of a Mafia family, seen through the lens of his family
life. This is a good way to sentimentalize organized crime, even with its
violence and treachery. It makes these into homey and sympathetic people who go
through the same things as the rest of us: the kids growing up, messing up in
school, teens stretching the limits. A mid-life crisis that sends the husband
into psychotherapy with a female psychiatrist. A middle-aged housewife flirting
with a good-looking Catholic priest, while her husband shacks up with young
bimbos. Soap-opera stuff, but she can brush it aside precisely because they are
bimbos, not real rivals, knowing underneath it all that Tony Soprano is
committed to his family. Just boy stuff, as Melania Trump might say.

It is
an old-fashioned Italian family.The father is the undisputed boss, loyalty the chief virtue. Everything
centers on a family business, continuing across the generations, branching out
to relatives who can’t be forgotten, no matter what. Uncle Junior, an over-the-hill
hoodlum. Tony’s querulous mother, who berates him for not coming to see her
enough, while he maneuvers her into a nursing home she hates. Christopher, the
nephew learning the business, callow and sleazy but an eager enthusiast, a sort
of male ingénue working his way up in a crime career.

As a
Mafia family, it combines domestic with fictitious kin and pseudo-family
relations. Hoodlums like Pauley and Big Pussy, who come over for home-made
Italian pasta and are regarded as family by the kids. Boyhood friend Artie, a
genial restauranteur who provides another meeting-place and prospers under
Tony’s protection. The Mafia operates in a world of small family-run
businesses, never in bureaucratic corporations or chains. They are independent,
outside of formal rules and record-keeping, under the radar. Family-like
loyalty and privacy is the secret of their success.

Tony’s
headquarters is the back office of a roadside strip joint-- or for that matter,
out front at the bar where the girls undulate while insiders shop-talk and
plot. Tony lives in a big house in a wealthy suburb, but he commutes every day
to a neighborhood of cheap store-fronts where his business associates hang out.
Killings take us inside kitchens and meat-lockers; bodies are buried in garbage
dumps-- one of Tony’s fronts is the waste disposal business.

This
is crime with a work ethic. Tony and his gang are always taking care of
business-- one difference between the Mafia elite and casual robbers who commit
the intermittent stickup to finance their drug habit. They keep regular hours
and put in overtime when needed. Tony suddenly stops his car to chase down
and beat up a guy who owes him money-- a gambling addict on the hook for huge
interest to Tony’s shylocking operation. Taking his daughter on a visit to a
New England college, Tony spots an aging police informer now in an FBI witness
protection program; so while Meadow listens to the college admission spiel,
Tony sneaks out to kill the rat. Drama is always popping up in the midst of
ordinary routine.

Behind
the scenes of everyday life, something is hidden and exciting. This is
the formula for detective stories-- that distinctively modern form of
literature, enlivening our disenchanted world where almost everything is routine. The Sopranos works the formula from the
point of view of the criminals, while bringing it closer to our own lives by
embedding crime business in the cycle of domesticity.

The Trumps

The
Trumps are another family in the pre-modern mold.

Donald,
of course, the head of family, both domestic and business, with precious little
distinction between them. An over-the-top egotistical self-promoter. That
itself is a business asset, since Trump is a brand name, in a post-modern economy
where branding is the core money-maker and the grunt work is shunted off to the
periphery. Even the controversies add to the attention. Is he a
mega-billionaire? Is he faking it, a pyramid of debts and shaky holdings? It’s
all part of the drama.

Trump
is a pre-modern business model in the most post-modern of economic sectors.
Flashy hotels, golf resorts, casinos, the “in” places where the action is. His
venues are places for spectacle and entertainment. Beauty pageants. Boxing
promotions where famous fighters shake hands in the front rows and Penthouse
Pets parade around the ring carrying the round cards and have their pictures
taken with Donald Trump.

The
web of businesses is family held, avoiding bureaucratic strings. Trump decides
as much as possible himself, surrounded by a loyal core of long-time employees,
many of them women. In addition to this pseudo-family, his businesses are run
by his children, especially his highly competent older daughter, Ivanka, and
her husband Jared. He is the kind of relative who gets absorbed into the core
of loyalists. Jared is a parallel to Donald’s own career: launched by a wealthy
entrepreneurial father, striking off in his early years on his own ventures;
even taking over when the father gets caught on the wrong side of the law. Like
the Mafia, it is more of an umbrella for holdings than a vertical bureaucracy.
As a closely-held family business, it stays as far as possible from the formal
rules and record-keeping of big corporations, publically-traded companies, and
government regulations. Like the Mafia, it is based on the opposite of
transparency-- which means open to formal oversight and outside interference.

Managing
the network of enterprises is very labor-intensive, a more than full-time job--
in effect no time off at all, no distinction between private life and work.
Trump manages it by being very quick and decisive. He also needs very little
sleep, a workaholic who gets his emotional energy from his business
interactions where he is always in the center of control. For implementation,
he has to rely on trusted followers whose loyalty is unquestioned. And he does
this successfully by grooming his children to join him in the inner circle. Far
from leaning over backwards to avoid the impression of nepotism, he
concentrates on making nepotism work.

Even
Trump’s bitterest opponents give tribute to his family. On campaign and in the
public eye, they make a good impression: good-looking, well-dressed,
well-behaved, seriously involved. They are in implicit contrast to so many
children of elite families, the spoiled rich, the money squanderers, the
druggies, the Teddy Kennedys with their car crashes, Sarah Palin’s family of
trailer-trash scrapes, Bill Clinton’s and Jimmy Carter’s black-sheep brothers.
Donald himself may create the scandals but his family is united in riding them
out; this is not one of the all-so-frequent upper class families divided by
battles over inheritance or waiting for the older generation to quit. How
does Trump keep them loyal and committed? Apparently, by involving them from an
early age. He keeps them around and pays frequent attention to them--- not by
taking time out from his business, but by bringing them into it as much as
possible. Donald’s divorces and remarriages do not prevent him from keeping his
children close. He claims to have told them every morning at breakfast to stay
away from drinking and drugs. Like Donald, they are not party animals but call
the shots at promoting parties: similar to Mafia chiefs who run the drug business
but strictly prohibit using it themselves. Trump himself does not drink, one
reason why he can be up in the middle of the night sending Tweets.

Trump’s
pre-modern family/business is a source of controversy, especially in the period
of transition to the Presidency, and very likely beyond. The two entities are
almost co-extensive, the opposite of the now-conventional wall between public
and private life. It is considered mildly scandalous that Ivanka, Jared, or
Donald Jr. are involved as diplomatic contacts andgo-betweens with foreign leaders. This will not go away.
Trump’s business and political careers have been based on defying pressures to
adhere to conventional consensus. Like the Mafia, the familistic structure is
the source of its strength. Controversies about it are just one more thing
keeping the Trump saga in the center of attention.

Another level up in social
class

The
Trumps and The Sopranos are not
identically patterned. The Sopranos are upwardly mobile from the working class.
They have made it into the upper-middle class segment that lives in the
expensive suburbs but still does their own cooking. They have all the
middle-class comforts but talk in the accents of East Coast immigrant working
class. Tony’s mob is centered in grubby working class areas and caters to
working class male recreations. They have money for NFL games, NBA, hockey--
for that matter, they are the clientele as well as some of the more profitable
workers servicing Atlantic City casinos like Trump’s. As sociologist David
Halle found in his research on oil refinery workers in northern New Jersey
(almost exactly where Tony lives), they are working class on the job, but at
home they are middle class, by their expenditure patterns and by the
respectable activities their wives drag them to.The sociology of this group is perfectly captured in the
tug-of-war between the stripper bars across from the factory where many workmen
spend their lunch and after-work hours, and the Catholic church events and
school activities their wives involve them in. The Mafia is, so to speak, the
most aristocratic of the working-class aristocracy.

If The
Trumps are a version of The Sopranos,
they are a very upper-class version. They are the glittery part of the upper
class. There also exists a more traditional, boringly respectable part of the
upper class, the world of polite formal occasions, charity balls and opera
openings, ladies’ luncheons, stuffy men’s clubs (now become stuffy men’s and
women’s clubs), testimonial dinners and cliché-recycling conferences. The Trumps
have entree into this, but it is not what elevates them to the center of public
attention.

Women
are a crucial part of Trump’s image. His wives have all been fashion models,
but distinctive ones.Sexy rather
than the skeletal look of the runways; sleek and glamorous in a throwback style
that is more Playboy than
fashion-world edginess.Supermodels who spin off their own brands and ride the momentum of their
circle of fame into personal business lines. Trump and his women play off each
other like acrobats on a high-wire act. Their audience is middle-brow, not the
esoteric in-group fashion statements of the self-consciously sophisticated. This is not Mamie Eisenhower’s upper class, nor Truman Capote’s. The
Trumps present the upper-class image most palatable to today’s lower-middle and
working class.

Are
there sleazy business dealings? Of course. Hard-ball lawsuits; aggressive
bankruptcies; stiffing your contractors; making your lenders absorb losses
because you are too hard-charging and too big to fail. These tactics are not
exactly unknown in the creation of big business fortunes, from the time of
Rockefeller to the corporate raiders of the present. French sociologist Michel
Villette found that virtually all of the big fortunes made in Europe and the US
since the 1950s involved shady legal tactics. Machiavelli wrote that the way to
carry out a coup is to chop off your enemies’ heads, display them on the city
walls, and join the church procession at the cathedral next morning. The modern
American way of laundering predatory fortunes into respectability is to
ostentatiously give a lot of money to charity, especially through a family
foundation. Trump’s style is more in-your-face, making up in boldness for what
it lacks in smarminess.

The Mafia-family genre

The Sopranos is in the lineage of
sentimentalized Mafia films going back to the early 1970s. The Mafia was a very
secretive organization, above all in its center of power, New York City.
Although there were occasional spectacular murders and high-profile
investigations, on the whole the structure and operations of the Mafia were
little known until the revelations of Joe Valachi, an FBI informant, in 1963.
This inspired a popular novel, which became the Godfatherin 1972.
Like The Sopranos, the technique is
to present a Mafia family sympathetically, from the point of view of its home
life.We see less about
Mafia rackets than in The Sopranos,
as most of the plot is taken up with a Mafia war. The aging Godfather (Marlon
Brando) is badly wounded in an assassination attempt; his boys have to take
over the family and fight off a rival borgatta.

The plot takes a sentimental turn. The youngest son (Al Pacino) has been
brought up to go straight; he has gone to college-- the first of his family--
and is expected to assimilate their wealth into the WASP elite. But with his
father incapacitated and the war going badly, the youngest son volunteers to be
the go-between to negotiate peace with the rival Mafia chief. They scope out the
meeting place in advance, a restaurant where they can hide a gun in the toilet.
Pacino arrives, is patted down for weapons; eventually excuses himself to go to
the bathroom, comes back and shoots the enemy chief. Then he goes on the lam to
Sicily, where he learns about his Mafia roots and acquires the manners that
will eventually promote him to Godfather when he returns to America.

The Godfather mixes incidents from different
historical periods. Marlon Brando’s character is based on Carlo Gambino, who took
over one of the five New York families after a Mafia war in 1957. But the
restaurant murder is based on the 1930-31 Mafia war that established Italian
hegemony in the New York crime world. One of the lieutenants, “Lucky” Luciano,
decided to end the war by double-crossing his boss. What happened was roughly
what we saw in The Godfather-- the young
man telling the Boss he's got a deal with the enemy, going to the toilet, the
bodyguards disappearing while killers burst in shooting. A few months later,
Luciano pulled another tricky set-up on the other remaining Boss, using hired Jewish hit-men in disguise. This
was epoch-making for the New York Mafia, since Luciano proceeded to set up a
five-family “Peace Commission” to approve all Mafia hits and keep its affairs
under cover by systematic bribing of New York officials.

Flash
back to the present, which is to say 1972, the year The Godfather set a box office record. It was the triumphant era of
the black Civil Rights movement, the latter phase when white ethnics started
making similar demands for recognition. Mafia secrecy was not blown just by
best-sellers and Hollywood. Joe Colombo (head of the Colombo family) was making
public speeches rallying Italian-Americans like Frank Sinatra, to protest
against defamation (such as the slur of mentioning the Mafia). Joey Gallo,
believed to have engineered the shooting of Colombo at his Columbus Day rally
in 1971, was temporarily the darling of cafe society before being shot at a
Manhattan restaurant in 1972.

The Mafia
saga is full of ironies and contradictions, as far as its public image goes.
One of the slogans among intellectuals in the 1970s was “the rise of the
unmeltable ethnics”-- an attack on White Anglo-Saxon Protestant domination, and
a refusal of the ethnics to assimilate to it. This is part of the rhetoric that
by the 1980s became known as Political Correctness, and which continues today
in an expanded array of group identities that claim revenge on WASP (and male)
domination. The Godfather films were
the first triumph in popular culture of this anti-establishment rebellion. The
irony is that The Godfather represents successful upward mobility from ethnic roots into the
American upper class. In a climactic scene, Al Pacino is now the Godfather,
married to a naive WASP woman, a trophy bride for the upwardly mobile. She has
qualms about whether her husband is involved in all the violence that swirls
around their luxurious life. Finally she confronts her husband: Tell me the
truth. Did you order these killings? Pacino counters: if I tell you, will you
stop asking? Yes, she says. OK, he replies, No. The Mafia has made it; the
family is intact, even managing to assimilate a clueless upper-class WASP into
its underground life.

The Godfather is a coming-of-age movie,
reaffirming your ethnic roots. Our hero grows up to become his true ethnic
self, defeating all enemies both professional and cultural.

The Sopranos have not changed much from
this point. They are middle-class Americans, with the
lifestyles of 30-40 years later. Instead of grand Mafia chiefs, they are in the
local grind oforganized crime,
showing more working class roots than The
Godfather did. Partly this reflects a real historical decline in the Mafia;
with RICO prosecutions since the 1980s, the remaining Mafia families have
nothing like the money and influence they had at mid-century. This is one
reason why it feels harmless to be a fan of thinly fictionalized Mafia
characters; they have been displaced by Dominican mobs, Russian oligarchs, and
Mexican cartels in the sphere of big-time crime. Minor league criminals with a
family organization that lends itself to sentimentalizing, the Mafia has become
a comfortably naughty entertainment.

Why Trump is Great Box Office

Trump’s
political campaign dominated public attention from the outset. It’s the
Hollywood principle-- it doesn’t matter what they say about you as long as they
spell your name right-- in spades. Trump hooks people’s attention, whether they
like him or not; especially when not. It is like being addicted to daily soap
opera. The Sopranos blended soap
opera with Mafia violence. The Trumps blend soap opera with edgy big business
and edgy politics. Tune in for another episode to find out what outrageous
thing he’s said today.

Trump
goads people into responding to him, so much so that every candidate he faced
spent most of their time talking about him. On policy issues, his stances have
been heard before. The movement of grass-roots outrage at illegal immigration
has existed for decades. Trump ratcheted up the hyperbole with his slogan about
building a wall, and when Mexican leaders responded angrily, topped himself by
claiming he would make Mexico pay for it. Job loss to foreign countries and
profits going overseas has been an issue on the left; Trump made it his issue
with over-the-top threats against China. Opponents play into his game by taking
what he says literally and venting about it, whereuponinstead of backing off he thumbs his
nose at them. The underlying game is who gets to frame the issues and who grabs
the center of attention speaking about them; Trump wins on both counts.

Even
without the issues, the topic became his unconventionality and norm-breaking of
the established customs of public life. It began with Trump belittling other
candidates to their face, turning dignified debate formats into a political
version of the Jerry Springer show. The press is accustomed to creating news by their
questions at press conferences; Trump refused to let them control the
situation, calling out persistent reporters for their pushiness. After the
election, the usual behind-the-scenes selection of top officials was been
turned into try-outs televised at the front door. Manners became the message.
Established media and politicians constantly find themselves playing straight
man to his punch lines. Constantly upsetting the apple-carts made all other
candidates look static.

How to defeat the politics of
scandal

Established
social life relies on the mechanism of scandal to keep things
conventional.But Trump constantly
plays on the edge of scandal anyway; digging up dirt about his past is only
ephemeral news. He won’t release his tax returns, although every other
candidate has done it for years? It’s a custom, not a law, and anyway (actions
speaking louder than words) I’m not going to do it just because you demand it.
Bring on the next scandal. How about the pussy-grabbing tape? Ordinarily sex
scandals are deadly in public life. How Trump survived the outcry is
instructive. He refused to apologize, and even counter-attacked with sleazy
sex-charges of his own. The refusal to apologize is itself outrageous, in the
eyes of the attacker. But a scandal is an emotional snowball; once it gains
momentum, anyone caught off balance by it gets flattened. Whether by instinct
or by calculation, Trump held his ground and played for time.

One
thing that helped is how expectable the politics of scandal has become. In the
normally deadlocked mode of American politics, where it is difficult to win on
the issues, the weapon of choice has been to spring a scandal. Experienced
political operatives are familiar with the Saturday Night Special (for a
Tuesday election date); with the October Surprise that the Clinton campaign
surely must have thought would clinch their victory. Trump not only rode it out
but battened on it. As Republican political pros joined the chorus of shocked
voices, Trump marshaled his supporters to stand fast: whatever we may feel
about his language, we’re still there on the issues; the other side is worse;
it’s just dirty politics, this October surprise. Above all, breaking the
emotional momentum.

As
sociologists have pointed out, a scandal is a multi-layered event. First,
something is revealed that is considered a scandalous breach of propriety. But
what gives the scandal its power is the secondary scandal, looking for the
cover-up; widening the hunt to those who not only connived but failed to do
anything about it. A truly powerful scandal is where everyone who fails to
denounce the scandal becomes a target. If you are not with us in the
witch-hunt, you must be one of the witches. That is why the chorus of former
supporters joining in the denunciation is the switching point. The attitude of
prominent supporters like Mike Pence and Reince Priebus kept the secondary
scandal from getting out of hand. (There would be no equivalent of the Republican
senators who joined the Watergate investigation and thereby raised their own
popularity.) It was a pause, a slowing-down that broke the emotional momentum.
During this period stories emerged of voters who were afraid to express their
support of Trump; but at least they didn’t denounce him. Pressure to join a
nation-wide denunciation dropped. Soon it was just the Democrats talking to
themselves. In the politics of scandal, the time-dynamics of collective
emotions are the key. A few weeks of relative calm gave opportunity for other
events to intrude (the FBI/email flurry, round 2) and the sex scandal was old
news.

Has
America gotten beyond the politics of scandal? Not likely. Not everyone has the
bluster to play it like Trump; and he had plenty of experience with scandals in
his business/ entertainment career, where scandals don’t necessarily hurt.
Probably the profession of political operatives, battered as they are, will
keep the Saturday Night Special in their playbook.

A new era of media politics?

It is
often said that Trump’s style is tailored to the social media and the
dispersion of attention away from the traditional gatekeepers of public
information. This is true, although the mainstream media still provide some
common focus of attention, that would otherwise be lacking when everyone is
camped in their own little Internet world of the like-minded. Trump won because
the mainstream media, competing among themselves for market share, quickly
publicized every outrageous thing he said on Twitter and every incident at his
rallies. After all, long political campaigns are very repetitive, and stump
speeches hardly make breaking news. The politics of edginess, combined with the
saga of the glittering Trump family, made it irresistible to put him in the
driver’s seat in the struggle for attention.

The Sopranos are the archetype of the
serial melodrama that lets us live vicariously in a family that is like ours
but more exciting. But at least we knew it was a show put on for our
entertainment. The Trump show is orchestrated by Trump himself, with the aid of
a loyal family team, smoothly on display. It has just the combination of glitter,shock value, and old-fashioned loyalty
to keep us watching. And in politics, as in most things, controlling the center
of attention is the formula for success.

How
long will it last?Even the most
popular TV shows have their day; the greatest box office records are eventually
eclipsed. Here is another problem for the sociology of emotional time-dynamics.
If scandals have a make-or-break turning point within their first weeks, what
determines how long political soap opera keeps up its fascination? Stay tuned.

Sunday, November 13, 2016

The civil war in
Syria has now killed a quarter of a million people, and driven 4 million people
to foreign countries where they wait hopelessly in the limbo of refugee camps.
Half the people who remain in Syria are homeless. Out of a population once estimated
at 18 million,about
three-quarters have lost everything.

This
self-destructive war began in 2011 in the Arab Spring, imitating popular
demonstrations elsewhere in the region that temporarily brought down authoritarian
governments. But these were tipping-point revolutions, winning by contagious
mass enthusiasm that brought a segment of the regime's forces over to the
revolutionary side. Tipping points work best when the action is concentrated in
a capital city. But where struggles are dispersed, the regime fights back and
battles take place across the country, the moment when a few army leaders can
settle things by switching sides has passed. Concentration favors short and
relatively bloodless transitions; dispersion creates lengthy civil wars.

Syria had two big metropolitan
areas, each about 2.5 million. While fighting developed in Damascus in the
south, Aleppo in the north initially tried to stay out of it. But neutrals soon
become victims as conflict escalates. Rebels turned from peaceful
demonstrations to guerrilla tactics. Since guerrillas depend on hiding in the
civilian population, they made places like Aleppo into battlegrounds. Civilians
were hit both by guerrillas weapons and by the regime's counter-attacks. The
cycle of atrocities had begun, each side motivated by hatred and revenge for
what the other side did to them. In the atmosphere of polarization, neutrals
are condemned as no better than enemies. This helps explain the callous
disregard for the millions whose livelihood is destroyed in somebody else's
fight.

What can the rest of
the world do?The spontaneous
sentiment in a world of mass communications is to support the good guys and
help defeat the bad guys. The problem is that in this kind of war the good guys
turn into bad guys too. Guerrilla war is intrinsically messy, and
anti-guerrilla war carried out by air power tends to destroy everything on the
battlefield, no matter who happens to live there.

Outside intervention
makes things worse.A civil war
that would wind down by running out of resources is kept going artificially,
when outside regimes send in weapons and fighters to their favorite factions.
Ideological wars are particularly vicious, since an ideology recruits the most
dedicated believers.Today this is
most obviously militant Islam, but the same destructiveness has been seen for
ideological volunteers fighting for fascism, communism or democracy, as in the
Spanish civil war of the 1930s.

And multi-sided
conflicts are most difficult to settle. A two-sided war has a clear termination
point. But three, four, five or more factions, especially when they have
independent bases and external allies, make an intrinsically unstable
situation, where the weakening of some factions opens up opportunities for
others to form. This is chaos in the technical sense of the term; the system
does not stabilize if one faction is destroyed, it just gives rise to further
conflicts.

In such a
configuration, the rise of something like ISIS was predictable. Its potential
destruction will not end the instability. Syria was not simply democratizers
vs. Assad's regime; but Sunnis, Shi'ites and sub-factions (Alawites, Druze),
and Christians; Arabs and Kurds; plus tribal alliances. Superimposed on this
are the outside interventions, some motivated by religious sympathies, others
by geopolitical aggrandizement.High-minded outsiders like the US are not exempt; whether our motive is
fostering democracy, countering terrorism, or just acting like a Great Power,
we add one more source of fuel for the fire.

Is there any
realistic solution?Hobbes
proposed, apropos of the English civil war of the 1640s, that any strong regime
is preferable to endless fighting of everyone-against-everyone-else.It is hardest to see this at the
outset, when everyone is enthusiastic for their cause and sure they will win.
But once a conflict has been going on long enough, many people realize that the
fighting is worse than whatever we were fighting about. This is certainly the
case in a civil war like Syria that has been going on for almost six years and
destroyed three-quarters of the country.

The emergence of a
sentiment for peace ushers in the most difficult phase of political conflict:
the peace movement opposed by the hard-liners. There are hard-liners in
different factions, but united in the emotion that their sacrifices should not
be in vain, that they must continue to fight because victory by the enemy is
unthinkable. The new axis of conflict becomes victory at any cost, against
peace while there still is something to be saved.

Hobbes' solution in
Syria would be to let the Assad regime win. None of the fanatical religious
factions would bring a stable government; the Assad regime at least has
protected minorities like Christians. This solution would be unpalatable to
many, especially to outsiders who have other concerns than the plight of the
Syrian population. This includes politicians in the U.S. who don't want to look
weak, and whose only idea is to throw more military force into the chaos. A
really courageous diplomatic move, allying the US and Russia to end the war
with an Assad victory, would save lives. The alternatives are to go on
destroying what is left of Syria, and generating even more of a refugee crisis.

A U.S. general in
Vietnam, after obliterating a village, said that in order to save the place it
was necessary to destroy it.Can
we learn enough from history to stop following this kind of thinking?

Tuesday, November 1, 2016

I
argued there are four kinds of charisma (frontstage charisma, backstage
charisma, success-magic, and reputational charisma); the more kinds you have,
the more charismatic you are; but there are other kinds of political leadership
and charisma does not always or even typically win elections.

Of the
four kinds of charisma, the most easily visible are front-stage charisma as an
inspiring public speaker, recruiting followers dedicated to a mission; and
being known for a string of successes.

As a
measure of public appeal, look at the percentage of popular vote won by all
major candidates for president from 1828 through 2012, from Andrew Jackson to
Barack Obama. I will leave aside, for the moment, the earlier elections from
1788 to 1824,since these were
essentially indirect elections by state legislatures.

Home run records and popular
vote records

If we
followed the changing record for presidents winning the highest percentage of
voters-- in the same way we can follow the record for home runs in a season--
it would look like this:

Andrew Jackson 182856.0%
of the vote

(since Jackson’s record wasn’t broken until
1904, I will insert in parentheses some other players who had very good years:
)

(Andrew
Jackson 183254.2%)

(Abraham
Lincoln 186455.0%)

(Ulysses
S. Grant 187255.6%)

Teddy Roosevelt 190456.4%-- new record

Warren G. Harding 1920
60.3%-- new record

(Calvin
Coolidge 192454.0%)

(Herbert
Hoover 192858.2%)

(Franklin
D. Roosevelt 1932 57.4%)

Franklin D. Roosevelt 193660.8%-- new record

(FDR 194054.7%)

(Dwight
D. Eisenhower 195255.2%)

(Eisenhower
195657.4%)

Lyndon Johnson 196461.1%-- new record

(Richard
M. Nixon197260.7%)

(Ronald
Reagan 198458.8%)

Since
Reagan, no one has come close to the record. The highest have been G.H.W. Bush
1988 (53.4%) and Obama 2008 (52.9%). In three recent elections, no one broke
50% (a return to the fragmented politics of the mid-1800s). [Update November 2016: make that four recent elections.]

There
are some surprises. No matter how great you are, charismatic, victorious, or
likeable, you never get as many as 2 out of 3 people to vote for you, at least
not in the United States.In the
47 elections from 1828 to 2012, only 4 times someone cracked the ceiling of
60%. In fact, getting 54% of the vote was done only 16 times (out of 112 major
candidates); it is like hitting 50 home runs or batting .350.

Is
getting a high vote percentage a mark of charisma?Some of the undoubtedly charismatic presidents were record-holders--
Jackson, Teddy Roosevelt, FDR--- and a couple of other charismatic leaders are
high on the list (Lincoln hitting 55%; Reagan hitting 58.8%).But Lyndon Johnson, who holds the
current record at 61.1%, was not charismatic. And the president who smashed
Teddy Roosevelt’s record at 60.3% was Warren G. Harding in 1920-- an astounding
surprise, since Harding went on to become one of the most scandal-ridden and
ineffective presidents. (In his previous career, it is true, he was regarded as
a great orator.)If Andrew Jackson
is the Babe Ruth of American presidential sluggers, Harding was the Roger
Maris-- a record with an asterisk. We all breathed a sign of relief when the
home run record was smashed by a real slugger like Mark McGwire or Barry Bonds--
in politics, it was FDR, who proved it was no fluke by beating the 54% mark 3
times. (Jackson and Eisenhower was the only other persons to do it twice.)

And
there were up-and-down politicians like Richard Nixon, who had one great year--
60.7% in 1972-- but who lost other elections and won in 1968 with 43.4%.Calvin Coolidge was the opposite of
charismatic, but he is on the list (barely at the cut-off point of 54.0%).Herbert Hoover was briefly second
highest all-time (58.2% in 1928), then went on to take one of the worst defeats
in his match-up against FDR. (He also did exactly the wrong things in dealing
with the Great Depression of 1929.)

Charisma
can help win elections, but it isn’t essential even for winning big. Some
charismatic politicians either were defeated repeatedly (Henry Clay, William
Jennings Bryan, each three times), or scraped into office (JFK and Woodrow
Wilson never cracked 50% of the popular vote).

Other
things are involved in winning elections, notably who your opponent is, and
whether something dramatically good or bad happens near election time. Nixon’s
nearly record-breaking victory in 1972 happened against a little-known anti-war
candidate (George McGovern). How Warren G. Harding dominated in 1920 seems
mysterious, but it was apparently a backlash against Woodrow Wilson taking the
U.S. intoWorld War I after
promising not to; and then campaigning for a League of Nations and a
nation-state for every ethnic group, which made him a charismatic figure in
Europe during 1918-19, but played badly at home. Some popularity happens on the
rebound or as a continuation of somebody else. Eisenhower’s popularity in 1952
and 1956 came as he succeeded a very unpopular president (Truman’s ratings had
fallen to a record-low 22% in 1952; and Ike went on to end the Korean War
deadlock that brought Truman down).LBJ’s record-setting victory in 1964 came as he stepped into Kennedy’s
shoes after the emotion-grabbing assassination, and proceededin a wave of legislation in 1964 to do
everything JFK had promised but didn’t carry out. LBJ’s popularity ratings
started high but slid downhill continuously during the Vietnam War, enough so
that this political pro recognized it was time to bail out on running for
re-election.

Popularity ratings highs and
lows

Since
the 1940s, we have standardized popularity polls. Gallup polls ask the question
of whether you approve of how the president is handling his job. This isn’t
exactly a measure of charisma, since it doesn’t tap into that
I’d-follow-him-anywhere quality of the symbolic leader.Charisma is not a personality trait but
an emotional relationship between a person who represents a principled ideal
and a group of dedicated followers.

Presidential
approval ratings respond to emotional events, but these peaks are very
unstable. Here are the highest ratings:

90%
approval for George W. Bush, mid-September 2001 (right after the 9/11 attack).

89%
for George H.W. Bush, early March 1991 (right after victory in the 4-day Gulf
War).

84%
for Franklin Roosevelt, January 1942 (a month after Pearl Harbor and
declaration of war against Japan).

83%
for John F. Kennedy, May 1961 (just after the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion
of Cuba).

These
are called rally-round-the-flag ratings. The nation comes together around the
presidential symbol immediately after a dramatic conflict event. It isn’t
necessarily a victory; 3 of the top 5 ratings happened after we were attacked
or defeated.

The
peaks come from the emotional effect of outside events, not from the
individual. George W. Bush’s rating was 51% in early September, just before the
9/11/01 attacks. Harry Truman’s rating dropped to the low 30s in 1946, bounced
up and down in the mid-levels, and bottomed out at 22% in February 1952, during
the bogged-down Korean War. George H.W. Bush’s ratings shot up from the mid-50s
in late 1990 to 89% with the Gulf War, but dropped 60 points in the
year-and-a-half that followed.George W. Bush fell from 90% on a downward path to the low 30s in 2007
and 19% in the financial crash of October 2008.

FDR
and JFK, on the other hand, maintained quite high ratings throughout their
terms in office (JFK averaged 70%, FDR 63%). This is probably an effect of
charisma, since these were charismatic speakers who inspired many idealistic
followers.

Other
peaks for non-crisis presidents were 79% for Lyndon Johnson, immediately after
taking over for Kennedy-- an overflow of JFK adulation in the period of
national mourning. Dwight Eisenhower had 79% in December 1956, just after he
had won his second term. Since Eisenhower was not a charismatic speaker or
personality, this shows more of a good feeling or likeability rating. Ike’s
average ratings in office were 65%, next highest to JFK’s 70.1%.

Approval
ratings are a mixed measure, a melange of sudden events, likeability, and
charisma. Is there anything else we can do with these polls? It would be nice
if we had a series of questions across all the presidents asking, does this
person represent an ideal you are dedicated to? Are you anX-follower, equivalent to a follower of
Jesus or Joan of Arc?

So who
had the highest floor? JFK never dropped below 56%.FDR’s floor, and Eisenhower’s, were next at 48%.The only president whose floor never
went below 50% was one of the three most charismatic presidents of modern
times. (Since there were no polls of this sort before 1937, we don’t know about
Teddy Roosevelt; but he did lose an election in 1912, coming in impressively
second on a third party ticket.)

One
conclusion is that charisma is never universal. Nearest to it are the momentary
events that stir everyone into public rituals like putting out flags that
proliferated during September-to-November 2001, but even these peaks never get
above 83-90% of the population. Looking at it the other direction, even very
unpopular moments for presidents leave about a quarter of the population supporting
them. These are the hard core base that anyone successful on the national stage
acquires. Charisma is what adds to that base and pulls one’s public reputation
up to a solid majority, unshakeable even in bad times.

Politics
is a process of conflict, a struggle between opposing factions. This is
especially true in a democracy, where popular elections regularly mobilize
people both to support and to reject. Democracy is a good breeding-grounds for
charisma, but we should not expect it to produce unanimity.

And
this is what we see in presidential elections. Getting 56% to 61% of the vote is as high as it gets.

All 44 U.S. presidents from
1788 to 2016

We can
divide them in 3 groups:

I. the
first 7 presidents from George Washington to Andrew Jackson: the founding
network

II.
the 18 presidents from 1837 to 1901: mostly mediocre except for Lincoln

I. The first 7 presidents are the famous
names of American history: Washington-- Adams-- Jefferson-- Madison-- Monroe--
John Quincy Adams-- Jackson. But being famous is not the same as being
charismatic. Of the 7, only 2 were charismatic: Jackson strongly so, Jefferson
in a milder version.

George
Washington was certainly revered.He was elected twice, unopposed, by the electoral college that was not
selected by popular vote. He did not have front-stage charisma: he was not
famous for making speeches or stirring up emotional crowds. He had no
success-magic; his record as a general was mainly a string of defeats and
retreats; the key battles of the Revolutionary War were won by others. What
Washington did was hold the Continental Army together through bad times until
the British finally gave up their costly effort to hang onto the colonies. In
the chaos of the loose Confederation, Washington led the movement for a
Constitutional Convention, presided over it, and saw it through-- with the
assistance of a strong team, most of whom also became presidents.

Personally,
he was known for great dignity and dedication. Did this amount to back-stage
charisma? He impressed people in personal contact, although he did not always
get his way, as in asking the Continental Congress for money. His reputation
grew in the period of constitution-making, and he became an icon, his picture
in every patriotic home. Score Washington un-charismatic on most counts--
demonstrating that charisma is not the only way to become an icon.

John
Adams was more of a political organizer, on the northern end of the
Massachusetts/Virginia coalition that made the new nation. He negotiated peace
with Britain in 1782 and served as a key diplomat. Un-charismatic, but an
important coalition-maker rewarded as Washington’s vice president and successor.

Thomas
Jefferson was the best-known of the Virginia politicians. He became known, not
so much for speeches but for his writings criticizing British rule, which made
him Virginia’s member on the Committee of Correspondence organizing the
colonies into revolt. His eloquence got him chosen to write the Declaration of
Independence. He was minister to France, America’s most important ally, and
Washington’s secretary of state. Jefferson was among the first to see the new
direction of politics, resigning from the cabinet to oppose Hamilton’s
policies, then running against John Adams with a new Democratic-Republican
party. Jefferson led the emergence of political parties, creating the first
nation-wide network to campaign for electoral votes. This made him widely
popular, not just as a hero of the Revolution, but by actively stirring up
public support. He was famed as the spokesman for decentralized democracy and
for the Louisiana Purchase, the first big territorial expansion of the U.S. and
a result of his diplomatic experience. Jefferson’s charismatic reputation came
less from swaying crowds than from circulating written ideology, from a new
style of political organizing, and spectacular diplomatic successes.

James
Madison was a political negotiator and coalition-builder. Agreeing with
Washington on the need for a stronger union than the disastrous Articles of
Confederation, Madison’s plan became the basis for discussion at the 1787
Constitutional Convention. He campaigned for it by writing pamphlets-- the main
form of political communication at the time. The Federalist papers were an act of coalition, written by Madison
together with Hamilton and John Jay, even though they would become political
enemies in the new government. A member of Jefferson’s political team, he
became his secretary of state and successor, winning re-election even though
the War of 1812 was going badly at the time.

James
Monroe was primarily a diplomat and loyal team member. An officer in
Washington’s army, Monroe learned law as an aide to Jefferson, then followed
him as minister to France, and negotiated the Louisiana Purchase from Napoleon.
He became Madison’s secretary of state and secretary of war. After belated
victory against the British in 1815, Monroe won the elections of 1816 and 1820
with virtually no opposition, the opposing Federalist party (which was
anti-France and pro-British) having collapsed. His most famous achievement, the
“Monroe Doctrine,” was actually formulated by his secretary of state, John
Quincy Adams. It made a principle out of U.S. success in keeping European
states out of the continent, extending the project to Latin America where a
series of revolts against Spain were breaking out as the Napoleonic wars
disrupted distant colonial rulers. (Monroe took advantage by purchasing Florida
from Spain in 1819.) Jefferson and his successors, although militarily weak,
played on the advantages of their French alliance to expand territorially;
meanwhile settlers and Indian-fighters were moving west anyway. The whole team
became cloaked in an aura of national success.

John
Quincy Adams was a lifelong diplomat. He accompanied his father on European
missions in the 1780s; and served every president as minister to European
states. As Madison’s secretary of state, Adams purchased Florida and improved
relations with Britain. Following
the usual succession, Adams ran for president in 1824, and was defeated by
Andrew Jackson in the popular vote; but since no one had a majority of the
electoral college, the election was thrown in the House of Representatives,
where political deals made Adams president. Regarding himself as old-school
gentleman above politics, Adams made no effort to deal with Congress or to
dispense patronage, and was overwhelmingly defeated by Jackson in 1828. John Quincy
Adams worked quietly behind the scenes and was uncharismatic in every respect.
He considered himself a failure as president.

Andrew
Jackson was the first really charismatic American politician. A long-time
frontiersman and Indian fighter, he became famous by defeating the British in
1815 at the Battle of New Orleans. His new form of party politics was like
Jefferson on steroids. He brought class conflict out into the open, campaigning
as the people’s choice against the rich elites of the East. The 1828 election
was the end of the founding network that had handed on the torch of office for
40 years.

It
also was a transition to a new style of campaigning. By 1840 it consisted of
marches festooned with banners, wagons with brass bands (“bandwagons”), slogans
endlessly repeated, the whole baby-kissing ritual that has endured down through
the television era. Jackson had frontstage charisma that his predecessors
lacked, in part because electioneering was becoming a big noisy public ritual.
Combine this with a contentious ideology, and the ingredients were there for a
president expected to turn things upside down. This Jackson did, above all by
instituting an all-out spoils system for federal offices. This too enhanced
political enthusiasm and Jackson’s reputation as a man of the people rather
than the established elite.

Bottom
line on the founding network: they were uncharismatic because they didn’t need
to be. They got power by circulating writings among the high-literate class and
building the country by skilled diplomacy. The new electioneering style came in
with the prestige of wider democracy, which also set off a demand to
manufacture charisma and hero-worship. With paradoxical results, as we shall
see.

II. The 18 presidents from 1837 to 1901 are
remarkable for lack of charisma.

From
Van Buren to McKinley, there is only one strongly charismatic president,
Abraham Lincoln. Only 3 ever won two consecutive terms (Lincoln, Grant, and
McKinley--the latter two distinctly uncharismatic). Two died in office of
natural causes; 3 were assassinated; 4 were not even renominated by their own
party; another 2 were defeated for re-election; 4 declined to run again,
declaring themselves exhausted or disillusioned with the office. In other
words, 15 out of 18 could not generate enough popularity or success to keep on
going.

Leaving
Lincoln aside, few of the rest had any kind of charisma. Five presidents
(William Henry Harrison, Taylor, Grant, Hayes, Garfield) were former generals,
nominated as war heroes rising above divisive political issues; none did well
in office. Grant’s administrations were full of corruption scandals, though he
won reelection on the prestige of his Civil War victories; but even as a
general, Grant was quietly persistent rather than charismatic.

Only 3
presidents had frontstage charisma, in the form of great speech-making.
Lincoln, of course, but the rest of the list is surprising. James Polk was
known as a star orator in Tennessee politics, an avid follower of Andrew
Jackson, whose seat he occupied in Congress. He attempted to evade the
increasingly divisive slavery issue by a platform of national expansion. Polk
bluffed a war with Britain to settle claims to the Oregon territory, then
invaded Mexico to acquire the rest of the continent all the way to California.
Despite his success, the Mexican War was opposed by principled northerners, and
a split among Polk’s own Democrats over slavery left him so exhausted that he
died 3 months after leaving office at the age of 54.

Andrew
Johnson has the historical reputation as one of the worst presidents, as the
first to be impeached (although acquitted). In fact, Johnson was unusually
courageous. He was the only one of 22 southern senators who refused to leave
the Union, whereupon he was almost lynched by outraged Virginians. Lincoln gave
him an administrative job and added him to the ticket in 1864, as a gesture of
reconciliation towards the South. After Lincoln’s assassination, Johnson
attempted to continue Lincoln’s policy of leniency, but he was sharply attacked
by the Republican majority in Congress who wanted a punitive reconstruction.
Early in his career, Johnson had been another Jacksonian populist, known as a
fiery stump speaker. Having both charisma and courage of his principles did not
save him from ignominious failure; in fact his courage contributed to it, since
he refused to maneuver politically, and he lacked the key requisite of
charismatic leadership, an admiring audience.

Cleveland,
who won two terms separated by a defeat (followed by winning the rematch), had
the reputation as a reformer, taking on the corrupt Tammany Hall machine in New
York, then pushing for civil service reform at the Federal level. This was
obviously a political opportunity, since so many administrations had gone through
scandal, and presidents found themselves besieged by office-seekers who
sometimes shot them when disappointed. He was one of the few presidents to ride
out a sex scandal, admitting to fathering an illegitimate child, and then
beating the opponent who made the charge-- Blaine, equally tarred with the
reputation as a corrupt machine politician. Defeated for office in the 1888
election, Cleveland declared there was “no happier man in the United States.”

The
most charismatic speaker of the entire period ran for president three times and
lost all of them: William Jennings Bryan. Known as the silver-tongued orator of
the prairie, Bryan was defeated twice by McKinley over banking interests versus
cheap money for farmers. McKinley had strong establishment and machine politics
backing, and projected an image of dignified respectability that prevailed over
the tub-thumping of Bryan’s raucous campaigns.

Putting
it all together, frontstage charisma paid off in political success for only
two: Lincoln and Polk. Both paid the price; Polk retired exhausted from
political infighting; Lincoln was assassinated.

What
brought them down is emblematic of the entire period. There were too many
contentious issues and deep-rooted factions: class conflict, banking issues, slavery,
territorial expansion, the spoils system. That is why so many presidential
candidates were compromise candidates nominated after lengthy convention
balloting, or were disowned by their own party. A charismatic speaker on
matters of principle might seize the public imagination of one segment, but
could rarely win the presidency or carry out his program when in office.
Inability to generate really sweeping charisma was built into the divisive
structure.

Lincoln,
who had great skills as a negotiator and coalition-builder, to go along with
his oratory, was alone in coming out of it with a towering reputation. His
martyrdom helped. In fact, we can date the moment when Lincoln became adulated
by huge numbers of people: late April 1865. His body was taken home from
Washington to be buried in Springfield, Illinois. It was a distance of 700
miles, but the train route covered 1700, snaking back and forth so that
millions of people could stand by the tracks to witness the procession. It took
13 days. It was probably the biggest funeral ritual ever, and had all the
successful ingredients: people assembled, united in focusing their attention on
one thing, welling up with one common emotion intensified by each other. The
result was turning a man into a symbol, a sacred object representing the
solidarity of the nation.

III. The 19 presidents from 1901 to 2016.
This is the era of statistics and surveys, and we have already seen its high
and low points.

Three
presidents were charismatic speakers and public heroes (Teddy Roosevelt,
Franklin Roosevelt, Kennedy), although only two had a record of successes;
JFK’s program was largely carried out by his uncharismatic successor, Lyndon
Johnson. Eisenhower, although uncharismatic, was unusually popular. Reagan,
quite successful in his program (though correspondingly disliked by the
ideological opposition), also was near the peak in voter support, although his
popularity floor was lower than the others. Obama, known as a charismatic
speaker, was an ineffective politician. His peak popularity rating (not
unusually high at 69%) was just after his inauguration in 2009. His floor was a
mediocre 37%, and his average approval 47% (a figure beaten by 10 of the last
13 presidents).

Overall,
6 of 29 modern elections were won by strongly charismatic leaders (Teddy Roosevelt,
FDR, JFK); another 4 elections were won by well-liked but uncharismatic
figures, Eisenhower and Reagan.About 80% of the time, an uncharismatic person wins the presidency.

References

In
addition to the standard sources, see:

On the
struggle to expand the voting franchise in the U.S. from the 1780s to the
1840s:

Chilton
Williamson, 1960. American Suffrage from
Property to Democracy.

Monday, October 17, 2016

The
phrase “war on cops” is partly correct. There also has been a war of police
against black people. Both have been going on for a long time, and each reacts
to the other.

The
recent argument is that violence is encouraged by black protests, mainstream
supporters and officials who have caused police to withdraw from active
policing, putting them in a defensive position with black criminals on the
offensive. This is a part of the causal pattern, but it is embedded in a much
larger process: counter-escalation of each side against the other. Both
political mobilization and violence play a part in the escalation process, and
this happens on both sides. A key mechanism is the emotions that pervade both
camps: sometimesrighteous anger,
sometimes jittery tension that blows up little incidents and feeds the fire
with atrocities.

Only a
small fraction of each side engage in violence; but for their opponents they
become emblematic of the entire enemy camp. The emotions of the most volatile
fringes drive the back-and-forth process.

The
micro-sociology of emotions shows there is something practical we can all do to
de-escalate the conflict. I will discuss this at the end.

Counter-Escalation Theory

Conflict
escalates when whatever one side does gives rise to a counter-attack. This
doesn’t always happen. Some conflicts come to an end.The ones that go on longest are where conflict with an
outside group increases solidarity; we feel a stronger identity, resolve to
fight back harder. The other side does the same. The most dangerous feedback
loop is when the two groups become morally polarized. The other side is seen as
more and more evil; therefore whatever we do against them is morally right; it
is righteous vengeance, it is street justice, it is doing whatever it takes to
beat back the menace.

Individuals
disappear from view; the cop you are ambushing may be one of the good guys who
sincerely believes in community outreach; the black man whose car you are
stopping may be a middle-class citizen. But at the moment of confrontation they
all fade into the category of the stereotyped enemy.

Since
whatever the other side does is seen in the worst possible light, we are quick
to see atrocities in whatever they do to us. Whether their attacks come from
racism, bureaucratic policy, emotions, or sheer accidents of mistaken identity
and poor shooting aim, they are lumped together as atrocities. In our own eyes
we are the good guys, so whatever we do is good; our own mistakes are minimized
and our violence is viewed as proper, righteous and heroic. Since the
psychology of both sides is the same, conflict at a high level of polarization
becomes a war of competing atrocities.

Communities
which are already isolated are particularly prone to escalation. Police tend to
be a closed community, who socialize mainly with each other, and avoid contacts
with ordinary citizens when they are off duty. They have strong solidarity, and
put up a front to outsiders. The result is that police generally refuse to
criticize each other in public, and regard the rest of the society as not
understanding them. Somewhat similar processes occur in the black lower-class
ghetto, except that there is much more internal conflict.

Escalation
does not go on forever, although it may take a long time to run its course. The
level of conflict goes up and down depending on other factors, including each
side’s logistics and its degree of organization. I will weave in these factors
as we survey the sequence of racial violence in the United States.

Gangs and Cops from 1940s to
2010s

The
modern history of gangs began in the late 1940s when the first youth gangs were
formed, initially by Puerto Rican teens in New York City. Criminal gangs
existed before, but those were adults; often they were connected to political
factions in the machine politics of big cities, and their members were usually
white immigrants. The new youth gangs are best described as fighting gangs,
since their main purpose was to project a tough image and to fight against
nearby rival gangs. While 1950s news sensationalism publicized them as
“juvenile delinquents”,youth
gangs were generally not involved in crime for making a living. They were drug
consumers but not yet drug dealers, heroin then being monopolized by adult
syndicates. Gangs were more like neighborhood social clubs for working-class
teens, now pushed out of the labor force by high school attendance
requirements. They evolved an alienated ideology and spearheaded the newly created
teen culture of rock-’n-roll music, blue jeans, T-shirts and attitude. These
styles were regarded as outrageous by white middle-class traditionalists, but
the alienated youth culture soon spread into the mainstream as well. Despite
its racial anchoring, a rebellious counter-culture acquired a large sympathy
population among white youth and urban adults after they grew up, underpinning
a on-going conflict between law-and-order and hipness.

In the
1950s, youth gangs spread in urban black and Hispanic ghettoes, and mushroomed
in the 1960s and 70s. In cities like Chicago, large corporate-style gangs
formed; in Los Angeles and elsewhere, horizontal loyalties to “color” gangs.
Some cities, like Philadelphia and much of the East Coast, continued to have little
street gangs-- which produce high rates of violence because their rivals are so
close by, and they lack bigger organization to restrain them.

Although
youth gangs are almost always ethnic and very racially conscious, on the whole
their violence is aimed not at dominant white society, but at each other. This
has always seemed paradoxical, but is explainable by how violence is organized.
In the 1950s, gang ideology was anti- “squares”-- i.e. middle-class white
people with their respectability and support of the police. In the 60s, gang
ideology aligned themselves with the civil rights movement against white
dominance, but scorned the tactics of non-violence and political reform. On the
other side, Irish youth gangs made a point of representing whites and acted as
a violent militia to resist school integration. Nevertheless, the vast
proportion of gang violence was against other gangs of their same race. Andrew
Papachristos shows that virtually all gang killings in Chicago have been
black-on-black, Hispanic-on-Hispanic, or white-on-white.

Why so much black-on-black
violence?

Similarly
among the most militant groups on the violent fringe of the 1960s civil rights
movement. The Black Muslims, or Nation of Islam, held an ideology that the
devil is a white man and that the world is heading for a final war of black
against white. Nevertheless, Black Muslims did virtually all their fighting
between rival factions, invading each other’s mosques and assassinating leaders
like Malcolm X. Their angry anti-white rhetoric upset the mainstream but there
were virtually no attacks on whites. Why not? In the segregated society of the
time, blacks rarely appeared in white spaces except in the role of service
workers; it was a lot easier to carry out attacks on one’s on turf. Black
Muslim temples were heavily guarded by a elite members called the Fruit of
Islam, on the lookout for attacks; in this atmosphere of suspicion,
confrontations escalated and mosques found themselves in local wars with each
other. Similarly, the first “color” gang, the Crips, was formed in L.A. in the
early 1970s during the height of the civil rights period as a movement to stop
violence among black gangs, and channel it into war against whites; in
practice, this meant Hispanic gangs.Within two years, the Crips alliance split, with the Bloods breaking off
into a rival color gang (red emblems vs. blue or black); henceforward, the main
concern of gangs in these two alliances has been to fight against the other.
(There have been more sub-splits and alliances, but the pattern remains the
same.) The parallel between youth gangs and religious militants shows something
deeper going on: ideological hatred of a strong distant enemy turns the weaker
side to violence against more accessible local targets-- against rivals similar
to themselves rather than enemies who operate on a different scale of
organization.

This is
in keeping with general theory of violence. Despite rhetoric of bravery,
dedication to fighting the enemy, and self-sacrifice for the cause, most violence
is successful when it attacks a target weaker than oneself. In street violence,
bigger groups attack smaller ones they happen to encounter; in riots, it is
mainly isolates who get beaten up by larger clusters. The preferred tactics of
violence on all scales are to catch the enemy off guard, to establish surprise
and momentum; to beat the enemy psychologically before beating them physically.
Thus burglars prefer to break into houses in their own neighborhood, even if
there is better loot to be taken in richer places; but burglars from the ghetto
feel uneasy about being in the suburbs, and more psychologically empowered on
their home turf. Armed robbers tend to stay close to home, too, but will
venture out to no-man’s-lands like semi-deserted commercial districts, or look
for isolated victims in interstitial areas with little street traffic. Having a
gun is not sufficient to feel strong; feeling dominant in the setting is even
more important.

This is
one reason why black street gangs virtually never take part in mass shootings
in schools; this is a phenomenon among alienated white youth in all-white
schools. Black gang violence almost always takes place on their own turf-- on
their street, or the streets adjacent to it, the turf of a familiar rival. On
the whole, more distant parts of the city are a mystery to local gangs, since
they rarely venture there. Although they may have an anti-white ideology, it
rarely comes into play as a practical opportunity for violence.

So far,
this has been about small group violence, usually armed with no more than
handguns. In the world of better organized violence, military and police forces
can range more widely; so do insurgent groups like terrorists. Fighting further
away from your home base requires more organization. It needs more logistics,
ammunition, transportation; better planning and intelligence; more
organizational backup to call in for help or to extricate you. And it requires
more organizational solidarity-- groups which continually motivate each other to
adhere to an ideology and to commit themselves to the emotionally difficult
task of confronting the enemy, especially when taking the attack to their turf.
Big organizations like armies and police usually undertake such ventures when
they have overwhelming numbers and weaponry. Small terrorist groups need the
support of closed-off cells, living clandestinely, obsessively planning their
moves. Casual street gangs have none of these resources and little of their
tight, dedicated organization. Hence their rhetorical commitment to toughness
and violence can only come out against easy targets, like themselves.

An
escalated war against the police needs more social resources to go on the
attack.

Race riots and politicization

Riots
are an opportunity for mass participation. Although gangs may take part in
them, a much larger proportion of the local population is involved: In the
biggest race riots of the 1960s, 10-15% of black men took part, and another 30-40%
were spectators and sympathizers .(Collins, Violence:
520)As usual in most kinds of
violence, a small percentage of the crowd does most of the violence, but the
part of the crowd that merely acts as spectators adds to the emotional
atmosphere of breakdown of ordinary law. This is what creates a “free space” or
“liberated zone” where the police, for a time, do not intervene. In fact,
violence between authorities and rioters takes up a relatively small amount of
the time during a riot; looting and burning give the crowd something to do,
prolonging the dramatic atmosphere that would otherwise disappear if there were
nothing to do but go home.

A
paradoxical result is that American race riots always take place in the
minority ghetto, usually on its borders and main commercial streets where there
are stores operated by non-black ethnics. The 1992L.A. riot after the Rodney King verdict was largely property
attacks on Korean and other Asian store-owners; photos show widespread
participation by black and Hispanic crowds. The Crips and Bloods called a truce
in their normal hostility so that they could take part in the riot.

Riots
publicize ideologies of protest. But whatever the slogans and the statements of
spokespersons who are quoted in the news, at the line of confrontation
mainstream society is always represented by the police. The police are often
the onlyvisible presence of white
society in what Elijah Anderson calls “black spaces.” Much of the time they are
regarded as an occupying force. A riot not only brings about a confrontation of
masses of local people against masses of police, but it is one of those rare
moments when locals have enough numbers and enough emotional dominance to be
able to defy the police.

The
precipitation point for riots has usually been a confrontation with the police.
The Detroit riot of July 1967, which lasted 5 days and resulted in 43 killed,
2000 injured, and 7000 arrested, began when police raided an after-hours bar on
a hot summer night; in the atmosphere of the civil rights struggle, bar patrons
fought back and the small police party retreated. When they returned several
hours later with reinforcements, locals pelted police cars with bricks, again
causing them to withdraw. The June 1967 Newark riot (26 killed) began when a taxi
driver was arrested and rumors of police atrocities spread among taxi drivers.
Although the issues of a riot may be framed as white vs. black, or mainstream
society vs. criminals and radicals, on the ground the main conflict is between
police and locals; and this sets the pattern for polarization within those
groups as they perceive each other. *

*
Sometimes also the Army is called out to end a riot. But in the US the army is
a national institution with a lot of legitimacy; occasional killings by the
army (such as Kent State in 1970) do not give rise to anti-army ideologies.
Things are different in this respect in Mexico, and in many Latin American,
African, and South Asian states, where the army is widely regarded as a
political instrument or a corrupt organization. In the US, however, most
collective resentment is acted out against the police.

Rioters
always lose in the end, but riots give memories of pride and defiance. Their
residue over time is to escalate long ground-swells of rebellions, in whatever
form they come out.

Riots are
better able to make a political statement than gangs. Although they almost
never invade white territory, riots attract universal public attention; and
although their threat of “the fire next time” is just rhetoric whose reality
consists in burning their own neighborhood, the city and usually the nation has
to at least temporarily pay attention to the racial divide. This is also an
opening for political movements and non-violent demonstrations; the
radical-flank effect of riots is to give the moderates more claim to make
reforms, lest the violent fringe grow stronger. Liberal politicians and even
some conservatives reacted by making reforms in the 1960s, dismantling the
legal institutions of segregation. The movement for racial integration also
improved the situation of black and other minorities in the middle class.

It left
a lower-class black population that continued to be segregated and in an
increasingly dead end economic situation. Poverty itself does not mobilize
well-organized rebellion, since mobilization needs resources. The inner-city
ghetto devolved into the land of the gangs, creating an underground economy of
the drug trade, and in some places like Chicago, big corporate gangs taxing the
off-the-books economy of the poor. For several decades, riots and
demonstrations declined, while the crime rate surged, above all in black
neighborhoods.

In the
relatively peaceful period without riots to mobilize political concern, the
black-vs.-mainstream divide deepened and entrenched. Civil rights reforms on the
legal level mainly benefitted a minority middle class. The worst part of the
ghetto has remained black-- that is to say, African-Americans, descendents on
the historic slave population; newer dark-skinned immigrants from Africa and
the Caribbean on the whole have done better at acquiring middle-class jobs.
This class-race-ethnic combination is the core identity for the contemporary
race war. Although many black people are middle class and most are not gang
members or criminals, * thepolice
widely perceive themselves as facing a hostile enclave in the midst of the
larger society. The cops are not even necessarily white European ethnics; many
are Hispanic, some are Asian and a few are black. But on the whole these ethnic
groups identify with mainstream society and historically have conflicted with
blacks. Cops (whether they are seen as heroes or racists, and whether or not
they are white) and black men (whether as dangerous criminals or innocent
victims) have become the two counterpart symbols of everyday conflict in
America. The African-American lower-class gang culture is the image that
outsiders have of where the trouble comes from, and the atmosphere of
polarization generalizes this image to all ambiguous encounters with blacks.

* The
proportion of the black male population of teens and young adults who belong to
gangs is about 10-12%.Calculated
in Collins, Violence: p. 372.

Escalation of police tactics

Police
tactics against crime in the ghetto have gone through a series of developments.
Traditional policing in the era of official segregation in the South meant
white police would arbitrarily enter any black dwelling looking for suspects.
But on the whole, crime of blacks against each other was not regarded as very
important. In the North and especially in the era of the civil rights movement,
police tended to abandon the ghetto. Elijah Anderson reports that in the 1980s
and 90s the ghetto was largely unpoliced; both in the sense that police did not
patrol there often and that they were slow to answer complaints; moreover when
police did arrive at a scene of robbery or violence, they were peremptory
towards everyone. In scenes with a good deal of angry talk, the victim or
complainant could easily find oneself being arrested. Accordingly, ghetto residents
were wary of calling the police. In this atmosphere, residents attempted to
provide their own protection, what Anderson calls “the code of the street.” The
stance was for everyone to appear tough, especially men but also women,
dramatizing by voice and gesture they were ready to use violence. Anderson
emphasizes that for the majority of people, the street code is a front, an
effort to head off violence; only a minority within the ghetto would actually
“go for street,” carrying weapons and living as predatory criminals. As noted,
only a fraction, about one-tenth of black male youth belong to gangs, but the
“decent” citizens (Anderson describes this as a folk term in some northern
cities) also give off a protective veneer, that could impress outsiders that
they are dangerous. Thus the street code, meant to act as a show to fend off
being a victim, in the eyes of the mainstream and the police, made most ghetto
residents appear indistinguishable from violent criminals.

Another
tactic, largely by white politicians, was to create severe penalties for drugs.
These laws were increasingly enforced, both for sale and for possession,
leading the huge growth of incarceration of blacks and Hispanics by the 1990s.
Since the drug laws fell on both the criminal segment and many of the “decent”
segment of the ghetto, they added to racial polarization. Prisons became the
center for spreading the antinomian culture. Severe sentences did not much
affect the drug business itself, since those most likely to be caught were low-level
dealers, who could easily replaced since they were one of the few prestigious
career paths in the ghetto.

The high
volume of drug arrests also had an effect on the police. As Peter Moskos shows
in his ethnography of the Baltimore police force, and Philippe Bourgois in his
research on north Philadelphia drug markets, police know the justice system is
overcrowded, and that prosecutors and judges let many suspects off. Police
become cynical about the revolving-door process, as well as exasperated by the
defiant attitude it fosters among those they arrest. Police respond with their
own informal punishment. This includes the tactic known in the culture of
Eastern police forces as “a rough ride”-- leaving a prisoner shackled but not
secured to a seat in the police wagon while they are roughed up by wild
driving. This is apparently the scenario in April 2015 by which Freddie Gray--
a black man who been in and out of court multiple times for minor offenses and
parole violations-- ended up dying from a broken spine after being arrested by
Baltimore police.

Around
the year 2000 came a reversal in police tactics. Previously they tended to
neglect ghetto crime except for easy busts for drugs. Now computerization added
new weapons. One version was COMSTAT, a centralized system put in place by the
New York Police Department, that compiles crime reports not in old fashioned
monthly or yearly statistics, but in real time; now police commanders could see
where crime was surging in the city and flood that area with cops. COMSTAT is
credited with having reduced the crime rate in New York City from one of the
higher to one of the lowest big cities; it resembles the “surge” that General
Petraeus used in Iraq to secure areas from insurgent forces. The main
limitation of COMSTAT is that it is expensive to implement. The NYPD is unique
in the size of its police force (35,000), and its ability to move forces
around; most smaller police departments lack the manpower for local surges.

Computerized
record-keeping has been put to a different use in other cities. Patrol cars now
have on-board computers, which officers can use-- not only at any arrest or
encounter with a suspect, but at any contact with a civilian. Infractions as
minor as driving with a broken tail-light or selling cigarettes on the sidewalk
now routinely result in a records check. Many minorities living in the gray
economy have past infractions; and these are often compounded by failing to
appear for court appearances, or failing to pay fines. As Alice Goffman shows in
her ethnography of a small Philadelphia street gang, the court system tends to
nickel-and-dime poor people to death-- metaphorically, of course, since these
are generally fines in the hundred-dollar range that poor people have a hard
time paying. The fines mount up since failure to appear or failure to pay
results in yet another fine. Everything compounds each other in this system of
city administration, policing, and antinomian street culture. Any innocuous
police stop can result in arrest on outstanding warrants; it is still a
revolving door but the police now are a constant, annoying presence in people’s
lives, spreading the feeling that everyone is a suspect. The court system
supports itself with fines, encouraged by city administrations under the pressure
of mainstream resistance to raising taxes.And not only big city courts and police forces use this
strategy of controlling the poor by collecting fines on them. Towns like
Ferguson, Missouri use a version of old-fashioned speeding traps on passing motorists,
now updated with computerized records to fine the poorer citizens of their own
town for minor offenses and accumulated penalties.

The
result is escalation on both sides. The police are now more actively harassing
the poor, and the poor are exasperated and defiant like the man in Ferguson who
walked away from an officer and was shot in the back.

Middle-class
tax revolt, revenue-strapped city administrations, and the predatory use of
police as a cash-collecting machine blend together into a Kafka-esque system of
feedback loops. Legitimation was given to the process by the “broken windows”
theory of crime control, which encourages police to crack down on small
offenses like urinating in public in order to eliminate signs of being places where
laws are not enforced. Modern day computerization and so-called “best
practices” have their worst effect on the street where the two most exasperated
components of the system come together: cops and poor black people. *

* Other
kinds of escalation in police tactics have happened, such as the militarization
of police equipment since the late 1990s. But helicopters, armored vehicles,
and body armor are used mainly for crowd control and riots, and probably have
little effect on the tensions of everyday policing. Demonstrations and riots,
as noted, are occasions where the anti-police constituency gets better
organized and more politically effective; so the threatening face of heavy
military equipment probably is no more than false comfort for the police.

Escalation of gang weapons and
insurgent resources

On the
other side, escalation of weapons and tactics has also gone on. In the 1950s,
gangs mostly fought with handmade “zip guns” firing single shots. Their most
dramatic weapon was the switch-blade knife, which made a sinister motion as the
blade whipped out-- but was not itself particularly deadly, since knife fights
are mostly for show and usually inconclusive. Gangs became more deadly, and the
murder rate picked up in the 1970s and 80s as more guns came on the scene.

Nevertheless,
for the most part gang weapons do not producemuch firepower. The accuracy of pistols is poor beyond a few
dozen yards; while at very close range, the adrenaline surge tends to produce
wild firing. Urban gang members rarely practice on a shooting range; and most
patrons of gun ranges are white. There is great admiration for guns in the gang
culture, but most gang members are not gun experts. The guns available in the
illegal market are often of low quality-- here too the poor tend to get shoddy
products. In the gang milieu, these defects don’t matter so much, since most of
the time what happens consists of blustering and showing off. Close
ethnographic observers of the gang scene find they display their guns, even
gesture with them, far more than they fire them. Shoot-outs with rival gangs
usually are brief , and getting hit is mostly a matter of chance. Not
surprisingly, when shots are fired they often hit bystanders, including
children; this is particularly likely in drive-bys where members of one gang
fire at a gathering in a park or street that includes members of a rival gang.
Hitting innocent victims is sometimes welcomed by gang members since it
enhances their reputation for being ruthless.

The low
quality and low competence of gang firepower is one reason they use it mainly
against each other. Rarely do they attempt to shoot it out with the police,
since they are almost always outgunned, not to mention the capacity of police
to call in reinforcements to almost any level necessary to prevail. *

* The
most organized violence against the police was by the Black Panther Party
during 1967-70, in ambushes, gunfights, traffic stops and police raids. A total
of 1 officer was killed and 4 wounded, while the Panthers lost 10 killed. By
1969-71, the Black Panthers were mainly involved in internal violence against
splits and rival groups, with another 10 killed.The Panthers began as a group to monitor police violence by
armed patrols, but turned into a combination of political movement and gang,
financing themselves by a tax on robberies and extortions carried out by
members.

In
recent years, there are occasional postings of cell-phone photos of gang
members carrying heavier weapons such as AK-47s. Nevertheless, this looks like
the usual blustering, since one rarely hears of such weapons being used in gang
fighting, or against the police. Long guns are more accurate than pistols, and
can deliver a higher volume of fire. On the whole, they have been used in overt
race war only when the local situation gave temporary emotional dominance to
insurgents.In the 1967 Newark and
Detroit riots, snipers with rifles fired at police and National Guard troops
from their home base in the ghetto. The July 2016 Dallas sniper represents an
exceptional level of escalation of firepower, producing a total of 12
casualties. He came from a suburban area and never participated in the gang
lifestyle-- which as we have seen, is very poorly adapted for fighting with the
police. In this respect, the Dallas sniper more resembles the isolated school
rampage shooter, amassing weapons in secret; the difference being both his
target-- police rather than school children-- and his military training and his
practicing weapons tactics. The Dallas sniper, in effect, was more assimilated
into white society, and he used white weapons and followed a white scenario of
mass killing.

The
strongest similarity is to the so-called “Beltway sniper” in October 2002, who
fired on white people from a car, killing 10 over a period of weeks.This turned out to be a black military
veteran, who (unlike gang members) trained for sniper skills, including with
his 17 year-old protégé, who did the firing from a peep-hole in the trunk of
their car. The motives and tactics of gangs, armed robbers, and grudge-obsessed
rampage killers are different. But such tactics propagate by imitation,
especially when they are highly publicized in the media. In a situation of
emotional escalation of black-vs.-police conflict, one can expect cross-overs
as the most militant individuals pick up the most lethal tactics.

The most effective escalation:
communications and multi-pronged mobilization

The
biggest weapon in escalating black insurgency has been, not weaponry, but
publicity and politics.During the
civil rights period of the 1960s, victories were won because different styles
of organization fought on different fronts. Non-violent protests by Freedom
Riders, church-led alliances, and direct-action organizations like CORE,
created a certain amount of attention, especially when they became
well-publized martyrs to segregationist violence. Riots engaged more of the
black population, and created an unavoidable sense of national emergency. A
fringe of individuals and organizations (SNCC, Black Panthers, Black Muslims)
emerged that openly advocated violence. Most of the actual gains, however, were
won by the most conventional part of the movement, the NAACP and the Urban
League, whose lawyers challenged segregated arrangements in the courts. It was
more of a tacit coalition than an explicit one, since most of these
organizations disavowed at least some of the others. But their combination
created the sense of national crisis that eventually moved the balance point of
American politics and the judiciary towards integration.

The same
pattern is reemerging in the current war of cops and blacks. The side against
police violence includes legal organizations, some politicians, organizations
of non-violent demonstrations, as well as a violent fringe of militants. We
should also count the gang violence of the black community as part of the
larger movement or atmosphere of resistance, along with the antinomian thrust
of the youth culture. The big difference from the 1950s and 60s is now there is
a national mobilization on the other side as well. The civil rights movement
was opposed by a mainly Southern segregationist bloc. Today there is a
widespread national constituency for cracking down on what is seen as
out-of-control lawlessness.Escalation and counter-escalation have been occuring on both sides. Both
sides have gotten more sophisticated in recognizing each other’s tactics. The
pro-police side sees that the black insurgency operates in tandem with
political and media fronts, and has tried to counter them as abettors of
violence.

The
major new weapon on the side of the anti-police insurgency is in the realm of
communication: the cell-phone camera. This had its analogy in the 1950s and
60s, when on-the-spot television news was just appearing, and police attacks on
civil rights marches made sensational coverage, especially when reporters were
also attacked in the mêlée. The new phase of mobilization against the police
began in 1991 when Rodney King’s beating by a group of police was filmed by a resident
with a new product, the video camcorder. The cell phone camera has made videos
recording ubiquitous, and the decentralized social media of the Internet has
made it hard for authorities to crack down on it.

Mobile
videos of the police in action are not the whole story; they only work in
tandem with the range of other tactics and organizations-- demonstrations,
riots, political movements, law suits. The police recognize videos as an
escalation against themselves. Confiscating cameras becomes a new side-issue
and flashpoint for further conflict. There is some validity in arguments that
videos capture only a part of the encounter and miss the verbal lead-up to the
confrontation; the solution to this, however, could be more recordings,
including voice, of police encounters with citizens. It is also true that
police body cameras can be dysfunctional or deliberately turned off. All such
recording devices become an expanding battleground. One can anticipate there
will be more things to fight about in the future.

Counter-escalation
on both sides spins off from the same technical innovations. Cell phone cameras
and the social media come from the same IT revolution that brought squad-car
computers and police tactics of running the record on everyone they stop. Both
police and citizens use their electronic networks to call for backup; the
police in a more organized way, with greater weaponry and authority; the street
people in a more sensationalist way, seeking backup in the form ofcollective emotions, demonstrations,
and politics.

Are there any paths to
de-escalation?

After
every highly publicized incident, whether the casualties are among the people
or the police, mainstream figures call for calm and reconciliation. These calls
have little effect on de-escalating the overall situation. Most violence and
conflict in all forms is carried out by small fractions of the population.
There is always an array from the most militant fringe, through the seriously
committed partisans, to those who are less involved. Between the two sides of a
conflict, those nearer the center are the ones most willing to listen to a
message of reconciliation.But it
is the extremes who carry on the fight, and drive the level of escalation.

The
flashpoint is the police on the streets.Cops are under tension every time they stop a suspect. Tension is higher
if conflict has escalated recently by previous incidents; higher if it is a
neighborhood with a high crime rate; higher if there has been a chase, or
alarming reports over police radio links.

Tension
rises sharply when the citizen isn’t cooperative or is defiant. Richard
Rubenstein, a sociologist who worked in the Philadelphia police force, reported
that the first thing an officer wants in any encounter are signs that the
person will not make trouble. He insists on taking the initiative, and
controlling the situation in little details, since these are the warning signs
for bigger trouble. Donald Black, who pioneered ride-along observations in
patrol cars, calculated that the chances someone would be arrested did not
depend on race per se, but on whether
the person was defiant-- and in the 1960s black persons were more defiant to
the police (not surprisingly, since this was the era of the civil rights
movement). Car chases and running away increase officers' tension even more,
since these are also acts of defiance. Citizens who turn their backs and refuse
to stop are acting defiantly, even if the initial order was something trivial
like “move to the sidewalk” (the first step in the 2014 Ferguson shooting).

Adding
together any or all of these factors increases tension. Bodily this is
experienced as adrenaline rush, the flight-or-fight arousal. The biggest danger
with an adrenaline spike is the loss of perception and fine motor control. When
heart rate races to 150 beat per minute or more, fine motor control is lost. An
officer may reach for a gun when he thinks he is reaching for handcuffs or a
taser. Trigger fingers produce wild or uncontrollable firing. Officers in
shootouts report time distortions like going into a bubble, vision turning into
a blur or tunnel vision on only one part of the scene. Hearing often goes out
so that they don’t hear their own gunshots; voices become incomprehensible. It
is a situation ripe for miscommunication and misperception.

Adrenaline-produced
distortions explain why shooting incidents happen where it turns out the
suspect did not have a gun, or was reaching for an ID; situations where stops
for trivial reasons blow up into killings. Since adrenaline takes time to
subside, the cop may empty the magazine of his gun, even after the suspect is
motionless on the ground. Catching these details on video certainly looks like
an atrocity.

Teaching awareness of body signs
and emotional control

What can
be done? The key is training cops to keep their bodily tension under
control.Sociologist Geoffrey
Alpert found that officers who are better at controlling the escalation of
force have a more deliberate and refined sense of timing in the moves of both
sides. More attention to such micro-details should train more police officers
up to a high level of competence.

Individual
officers vary widely in their use of force. About 10% of police account for the
bulk of all force reports; and less then 1% fire their guns in multiple
incidents. (Collins, Violence: 371)
The polarized viewpoint see cops in general as being out of control; but the
real issue is to make better officers out of the fraction that cannot control
their emotions and physiology.

Adrenaline
can be lowered, for instance by breathing exercises described by Army
psychologist David Grossman. Police training should incorporate more explicit
awareness of the distortions caused by tense confrontations. Weapons training
tends to go in the opposite direction, stressing quick reaction, and training
for automatic “muscle memory” in the default scenario that saving lives depends
on rapid action. Police tend to be trained for extreme situations rather than
clear assessment and self-control.

In the
field, police dispatching and radio calls tend to turn situations into
scenarios where the suspect is regarded as extremely dangerous.Citizen calls to the police may say,
someone might have a gun; or that someone might be engaged in a burglary. The
dispatcher tends to turn this into a simpler form, there is a gun or a burglar.
When messages are transmitted from one patrol car to another, the process by
which rumors are propagated takes over. As psychological experiments have
shown, each link in a chain of oral reports tends to simplify the message,
leaving out any special qualifications and turning it into the most obvious
cliché.In the case of police
transmissions, the more cars called to a scene, the more likely the message is
to turn into an extreme threat; weapons are definitely asserted to be present;
hostages tend to mentioned whether they exist or not and the suspect becomes
reported as saying he will won’t die alone.

The
combination of these processes explains events like the incident in
Clevelandin November 2014. The officer
who shot an adolescent carrying a toy gun on a playground had raced to the
scene and fired within 2 seconds after jumping from his car. Better trained
officers would be aware of their own body signs and the danger zone of
perceptual distortion, and would not attempt to fire until they had a clear
view of the situation.

Such
events are preventable. The answer is not so much after-the-fact criminal
charges and court trials-- these rarely result in conviction, and focus on
punishing individuals rather than on the improvements that can be made in
police procedures. Better training can be undertaken at local initiative by
police forces willing to do so. This should include techniques for becoming
aware of one’s own adrenaline level and heart rate-- body signs monitors like
those used in physical exercise would help here. And techniques should be
emphasized for getting adrenaline under control.There also should be better training of police dispatchers,
to make them aware of the distortions they introduce into messages; and making
patrol officers aware of the rumor-like exaggeration in their own chains of
messages to each other. A useful role of Federal and State governments would be
to review police training programs, to assess whether they are sufficiently
teaching bodily and perceptual awareness of the distortions of adrenaline rush.
Emphasis needs to be upon best methods for calmly and accurately assessing the
situation before escalating it.

What
about the other side of the counter-escalation, the anger, hostility, and
defiance in the black community? I have focused on what can be done by police
to control their use of force, because this is where public policy might be
implemented. But escalated conflict is driven by the extremes at both ends of
the distribution, and the tough guys of black and Hispanic communities
wouldbe harder to reach.Nevertheless, the message is much the
same.Be aware of one’s own
adrenaline, one’s rush of emotions, the situational blurring of attention to
everything but the impulse to dominate. And be aware of the same processes
going on inside the person on the other side-- awareness of how to calm police
down rather than rile them up. A glimmer of optimism comes from group
psychology programs in California prisons, where convicted murderers learn to
re-experience the events that led to their imprisonment, and to focus on better
control of their emotions. Prisoners who completed the program and were released
on parole had a re-arrest rate much lower than usual. It is not impossible that
in the future self-training in micro-situational awareness could spread even in
the most violent part of the population.

Framing
the issue as racism doesn’t solve it. Cops without racist attitudes, under
these kinds of tense situations, and with their adrenaline out of control, can
trigger off violent atrocities. The answer isn’t in the attitudes; it is in the
micro-techniques of how to behave in confrontations. There is a workable
solution. Whether we will implement it or not is another question.

REFERENCES

Randall
Collins. 2008.Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory.

Randall Collins. 2012:
“C-Escalation and D-escalation: A Theory of the Time-Dynamics of Conflict.” American Sociological Review